Two Concepts of Human Rights

Human rights are often defined as those rights which all human beings possess simply by virtue of being human. This definition invites thinking of human rights as a set of basic minimum standards for human treatment. However, the term human rights is also often used, particularly in the context of identity struggles or by opposition social movements, in a quite different sense to denote rights that constitute the human. Under this conception, human rights are the rights that make us human. This article sketches the philosophical foundations of these two concepts and points to some consequences for the implementation of rights in practice. The tension between the two concepts is to some extent what has driven developments in human rights, the tension only ever being resolved at one moment in history: the moment of revolution.